Cargo Space

This weekend was not one for freewheelin' fun with our 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS. Nope, since I'm moving next week I had to do boring stuff like use it to fetch cardboard boxes. Why didn't I just take a more suitable long-term car, you ask? The Camaro and the Miata were my only choices as a car to take this weekend.

At first I was skeptical our two-door sports car could handle such a job. I even told the guy who was giving me his cardboard boxes that I probably wouldn't be able to take his whole stack. But then I remembered that the rear seats can fold down so I shoved about 40 broken-down cardboard boxes back there. Sweet! Below is a picture of all the boxes out of the car so you can get an idea of how much the Camaro held.

This weekend, I also had to pick up a dog I'm fostering for the week. I didn't know how I'd be able to fit the dog and her crate in the Camaro but then managed to just stick the crate in the front passenger seat and the dog in the back. After these chores were done, I took the car for a nice drive. It's great to be able to have my cake and eat it, too, for a change.

Our 2010 Chevy Camaro SS is accumulating miles fast enough that it will easily reach our customary 20,000-mile mileage accumulation target within its year in the long-term fleet. So when a recent 2-day business trip to the east coast popped onto my schedule, the Camaro was drafted into airport duty.

That's my carry-on suitcase right there, the kind that fits snugly in the overhead compartment of your basic Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 jet. It fits only marginally better in our Camaro's trunk, nearly rubbing on top as it goes through the opening. Removal of the stretchy grocery net is an absolute prerequisite.

Once inside, there's halfway decent space if you shuffle things laterally into the corners, but the trunk opening itself is weak sauce unless you're a huge fan of the games Operation and Tetris.

He called his post "Unlikely Cargo Space" and he wrote: "Something I don't normally expect from a coupe -- even a decent sized one like the S5. That's a full suspension mountain bike with 29-inch tires. In other words, it's big. But it fits in the S5 when the seats are folded with no problems.

Nice."

Well, the Audi has got nothin' on our long-term 2010 Chevy Camaro SS. That painting you see in the Camaro's trunk (It's called Open Road and it was painted by my dad Joe Oldham, so be kind.) is about five feet tall, but it fit in the Camaro easily once we folded the backseat, which took about a second.

I've done burnouts in the Camaro, road tripped across three states in the Camaro and commuted in the Camaro. Clearly there was little left to do, so I finally broke down and forced it into domestic duty. Yes, I went grocery shopping in the Camaro last night. That's right, I used all 426-horsepower to pick up some Triscuits and Orange Juice.

And you know what? This modern muscle car handled it just fine. In fact, thanks to its cargo net, it handled it better than most of the cars in our fleet. The trunk opening isn't huge, but check out those struts, nice.